Janet Ward 
Weimar Surfaces [PDF ebook] 
Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany

Germany of the 1920s offers a stunning moment in modernity, a time when surface values first became determinants of taste, activity, and occupation: modernity was still modern, spectacle was still spectacular. Janet Ward’s luminous study revisits Weimar Germany via the lens of metropolitan visual culture, analyzing the power that 1920s Germany holds for today’s visual codes of consumerism.

قائمة المحتويات

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction. Modern Surface and Postmodern Simulation: A Retrospective Retrieval

Agendas of Surface and Simulacrum

Weimar Surfaces Now

Tactility in the City

Exhibiting Superficies

Philosophies of Counterfeit

Resistances to Weimar Surface

Surface, Academy, and World


1. Functionalist Façades: The Reformation of Weimar Architecture

The Building’s New Face

Decoration Do’s and Don’ts

Brave New World

Glass Culture

The Pains of Tabula Rasa

Surface Art at Home

Fashioning the Female Body


2. Electric Stimulations: The Shock of the New Objectivity in Weimar Advertising

Advertising as Power

Electric Modernity

The Architecture of Light

Shock Treatments

‘Light Lures People, ‘ Rejecting the Modern

The Embrace of the Avant-Garde

Postmodernity and the Space of Advertising


3. Into the Mouth of the Moloch: Weimar Surface Culture Goes to the Movies

From Caligari-Effect to Film-Set Omnipotence

Kracauer versus the Weimar Film City

Celebratory Film Streets

The Weimar Movie Palaces: Façades on Façades

‘The Total Artwork of Effects, ‘ Cinema and the Secularization of Ritual


4. The Display Window: Designs and Desires of Weimar Consumerism

The Phantasmagoria of Selling

Through the Looking Glass

The Opening in the Wall

Window Techniques

The Display Window as Mechanical-Age Artwork

Transparencies of Truth and Lie

Mannequins on Both Sides of the Glass

The Murderer at the Window

Post-Wall Re-Creations


Appendix: Selected Weimar Periodicals and Newspapers

Notes

Illustration Sources

Index

عن المؤلف

Janet Ward is Associate Professor of German Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is the coeditor of Agonistics: Arenas of Creative Contest (1997), co-editor of the forthcoming German Studies in the Post-Holocaust Age: The Politics of Memory, Identity, and Ethnicity (2001) and is currently writing a book on post-Wall architecture in Berlin